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Joseph Kagunda, Anglican Bishop of Mt. Kenya West, who has led an anti-Gay purge among his clergy.

When +Michael Curry, who becomes Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church two weeks from now, goes to the Anglican Primates’ Meeting at Lambeth Palace next January, I hope he’ll tell the African bishops this.

“You need to stop believing what the white man told you about Gay people. Just because the white man said it doesn’t make it true. It is a fact that the English clergy who came to Africa and brought you the Gospel – may their names be forever enshrined in heaven for it! – also brought with them the racism of England, the imperialism of England, the greed of England, the false ethnic superiority of England, and the homophobia of England.

“Nor is homosexuality a Western import, unknown to you prior to the arrival of the white man. Your own indigenous, homegrown, native LGBT community proves that. So does your own indigenous, homegrown, native LGBT history. In most of your clans, if not all of them, sexual variation was recognized for what it is – a phenomenon of nature, not of choice, a characteristic evidenced early in childhood, an intrinsic part of who that child is. Your cultures historically accepted this variation, they didn’t seek to destroy it.

“Every one of the native languages and dialects of Africa has a name for homosexual persons that predates colonialism. So stop saying it is a Western import. It’s not true, you know it’s not true, and so do your own people.

“Today you work in concert with your corrupt governments, armies and other institutions to scapegoat LGBTs, to distract your people from the real problems of poverty, lack of education, pollution and uneven economic development. Let me tell you, scapegoats are no more permissible today than they ever were in the Christian church. All people are sinners. Christ died for our sins. Do not seek to re-crucify him to enhance your own social prestige. He dined with tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners, including the likes of you and me. If he were here today he would surely dine with LGBTs and bring them the same kind of spiritual healing he brings to everyone else, Gay or Straight, black or white, male or female, slave or free, rich or poor.

“LGBTs do not need curing; they do not have a disease. They need the same human dignity we seek for all persons. And they need freedom from oppression and homophobia, brought to you by white fundamentalist Americans today as they were brought to you by white evangelical Englishmen in the 19th century.

“You are Africans. You are black. Think for yourselves, and put away the prejudices of your white conquerors, so that your nations, clans, families, citizens and churches can take their proud place in the world as persons entitled to the dignity God gave us all in creation and in our salvation.

“The same things you are saying about LGBTs today are what white Englishmen said about you 150 years ago; that you were morally inferior, dangerous and unworthy of freedom, and thus ripe for exploitation.

“Imitate Jesus, not those flawed but blessed saints who brought you their tainted version of him. Stop this persecution of those who are different from you. You don’t have to accept same-sex marriage, but you must stop the violence your governments, churches and clergy are committing against people every bit as capable of love as you are.

“And let us all remember that the greatest sin we can commit as bishops is discord, disunity and schism.

“Back off. Make peace, not war. Understand who your real enemies are, and be friends with those who offer you friendship and peace.”

—

I posted this on Facebook this afternoon, and some Episcopalians think I should send it to Bishop Curry. (One person called it condescending.) I don’t expect him to pull it out of his pocket and read it to the African bishops – he’s a gifted preacher and doesn’t need tips from me – but I do think it needs to be said in plain English.

It isn’t the whole story by any means; the three worst anti-Gay Anglican churches in Africa (Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda) are different nations with different histories, cultures and politics. But they have several things in common besides their homophobia; all are former British colonies, and all were taught Christianity in the 19th century by low-church, “evangelical” English missionaries. All three had homophobic laws imposed by their Anglo overlords – laws they now support more than the English do. All three Anglican national churches compete with Islam, Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism, each one homophobic in turn.

I don’t expect any of these countries to “see the light,” make LGBT Pride Day a national holiday and embrace same-sex marriage. But it is reasonable to demand that their Anglican churches stop promoting anti-Gay violence, stop scapegoating and fear-mongering for political gain, and stop tearing apart the Anglican Communion over a triviality like Gay sex when their own citizens suffer such appalling poverty, insecurity and lack of resources.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, last year at Trinity Church, Wall Street, New York. The parish largely finances the Anglican Communion. (Richard Perry/The New York Times)

I also think it’s time that Justin Welby and the Church of England be rebuked for cozying up to these violent Anglican bishops. He’s planning on recognizing anti-Gay American schismatics as a legitimate Anglican province and kicking the Episcopal Church to the curb – and he needs to be stopped.

He’s the ultimate target of my fantasy speech. Bishop Curry will be entering a minefield at Lambeth Palace just two months after taking office as the American Presiding Bishop, and I hope he doesn’t allow his own flock to be mistreated.

He will face a lot of pressure in London to be nice, speak diplomatically and turn the other cheek. I hope he understands that Jesus’s advice doesn’t apply in this situation. If he is personally snubbed, as Welby’s predecessor did to openly-Gay Bishop Gene Robinson (and the entire American Church) the last time, so be it. But +Michael doesn’t have the right to make every LGBT person in Africa, and every Episcopalian, be smited too.

We are counting on him to understand what he will face is a human rights issue more than a theological one, and to make no peace with oppression.

This Primates’ Meeting, full of brinksmanship engineered by Welby, is going to be a knife fight. I don’t want +Michael hurting anyone or being hurt himself – but he has no right to be passive when others try to shed our blood.

Jesus often fought with words; +Michael should too.++

Michael Curry, Episcopal Presiding Bishop-Elect, preaching this summer in Hayneville, Alabama at the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian. (Selma Times Journal)

This seems to be the kind of “welcome” LGBTs can expect at the Episcopal cathedral in Orlando, Florida.

[UPDATE BELOW]

By now you’ve probably heard about Baby Jack, the child in Orlando whose two fathers hoped to have him baptized in April at their church, St. Luke’s Episcopal Cathedral. They went through the mandatory instruction and preparation, scheduled the service, invited family members in – and three days before it was to happen, the dean of the cathedral, the Very Rev. Anthony P. Clark, called to put it off, saying some people in the parish objected to holding the service because the married dads are Gay.

Anthony P. Clark, dean of the cathedral

When the dads couldn’t work it out with the dean, one of them posted a statement on Facebook. Their story went viral. A member of a Facebook group called Episcopal Church Chat got up a petition, and in just a few days 20,000 people signed it. I also posted the dean’s photo on The Daily Office site. Soon the story spread further, to The Huffington Post and the Orlando Sentinel, as well as some other church sites. Twitter came alive, Bishop Gene Robinson wrote an article and so did the Rev. Susan Russell, former president of Integrity.

As the pressure grew, someone at the cathedral started firing off angry scripture-quoting tweets, and the Bishop of Central Florida, the Right Rev. Gregory Brewer, was drawn into the controversy; he’s the rector of the cathedral, over the dean. The bishop announced that he would meet with the two dads and try to smooth things over. They would issue a joint statement, he said.

Gregory O. Brewer, the Bishop of Central Florida who’s in charge of the cathedral in Orlando

He met with the dads, apologized and supported the baptism, which he said would take place later this summer. But no joint statement occurred; he issued one and so did the dads, a very thoughtful and gracious acceptance, which nevertheless didn’t back down from acknowledging that a wrong had taken place.

The internet cooled off—until Monday, when the cathedral posted a podcast of the sermon delivered by one of the staff priests, the Rev. J. Gary L’Hommedieu, at the main Sunday service the day before.

Gary L’Hommedieu, an assistant priest at the cathedral, vented his spleen in a sermon after the controversy began to die down. His name means “man of God.”

It’s the angriest, most bitter and self-justifying sermon I’ve ever heard – including 40 years’ worth of Christian hate and vitriol from homophobic preachers around the world.

This is not how Christians should conduct themselves, much less priests. Followers of Jesus are supposed to be known for our love and compassion. When we are wronged, Christ said, we should turn the other cheek.

I guarantee we haven’t heard the last of these guys. They have plunged the Episcopal Church, the diocese and the cathedral – the Gospel of Christ itself – into public scandal.

The bishop will survive this, because he met with the parents, apologized and tried to help.

But Dean Clark and Canon L’Hommedieu are going down in flames.

Their defense all through this has been that they didn’t “deny” the baby baptism – it was merely put off, postponed, pre-empted, suspended, delayed, deferred, adjourned, shelved. They took a rain check, put it on ice, stuck it on the back burner.

What they did not do was reschedule it. And that amounts to denying the sacrament of baptism to an infant who has never sinned one minute of his life.

If you were a judge in a courtroom, and the defendants tried to use semantics to save their necks, would you believe them? Or convict them?

Social media – that is, individual Christians talking to each other – forced the bishop to intervene. Public outrage, however it came to develop, trained a spotlight on injustice at this cathedral. L’Hommedieu can blame “West Coast bloggers” all he likes, but it wasn’t bloggers who committed Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy.

The baby did nothing wrong. He ought to have been baptized with joy as one of Christ’s own – not used to advance the hateful agenda of anti-Gay priests.++

[UPDATE: I’m taking bets on whether L’Hommedieu was the one who first objected to this baptism.]

This post will probably be a bit ragged, because I haven’t thought the subject all the way through. But it’s been stirring inside me long enough that it’s time for me to try to get some notes down and hope that they mean something to you. In the past people often called my writing stream-of-consciousness, which I’ve never thought was correct, but maybe this entry will be an example of what they meant.

Here’s a lesson appointed for Morning Prayer tomorrow. I’ll reprint the whole thing so you can see the context. St. Paul, whose writing is always wise and eloquent, claims that he put these gifts aside when evangelizing in Corinth, so that instead he could give “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” If he did that, he was surely a master teacher, but in this letter he will now eloquently explain his wisdom! (I’m convinced he knew that every word he wrote was holy scripture.)

1 Corinthians 2:1-13 (NRSV)

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,nor the human heart conceived,what God has prepared for those who love him” –

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

Learning what is truly human, seems to me, is our task in life.

And I can’t say I’ve arrived at the point of knowing; it’s more that I feel like I’m getting there, and also that I feel like I’ve always known. I want to ask, Don’t we all really know what it is to be truly human?

We may not live up to it – most people don’t, the world doesn’t – but that’s because we prevent ourselves from knowing.

We do, all of us, know what it means to be human. But we push that knowledge-awareness down deep inside; we seem to find it painful to know what’s human and not, so we keep ourselves from thinking about any of it.

As Leonardo Ricardo would say, we’re all about “pretend.” When I was a kid our adolescent term was having a “false front.” (Teenagers are experts on this subject, with built-in bullshit detectors.)

I never really lost mine and I bet you didn’t either. I’m not sure anybody does, but boy, does this world have massive incentives to give in to the BS.

Corporate life requires it – any large organization, for-profit or not. Bureaucracy demands we all worship the bullshit.

Family life demands it in most families – at least the ones we grow up in. I suppose we think we don’t impose it in the families we ourselves create, but then again we probably do.

Commercial life – politics and television – are all about the bullshit. A TV show may make comedy or drama about rebelling against the BS (“The Daily Show,” “Breaking Bad,” “Downton Abbey”) but every eight minutes it’s “brought to you by the bullshit.”

There’s nowhere you can go (including church) and not be knee-deep in bullshit. That’s all the Church of England puts out anymore, and the rest of them are usually even worse. I don’t really follow the CofE anymore, and even if I did I wouldn’t want to go into this, but the latest thing is some kind of yes-and-no from the House of Bishops about same-sex marriage; “Gay people are welcome, and marriages are legal now, but of course we can’t conduct them, and we don’t let clergy officiate, and they ought not even get one privately themselves, but of course we can’t prevent them, and though it might be possible to offer some prayers after people get the civil rite, prayers aren’t the same things as blessings, you see,” which makes no theological sense at all and therefore is pure bullshit, the Anglican kind, you get the idea, it’s all who-fucking-cares.

June Butler cares, Mark Harris cares, Alan Wilson does, Leonardo perhaps and Louie (Crew) Clay almost certainly. But me, I long since don’t care. Leonardo knows his vocation, to tell the world and church “Let’s quit pretend.” But that’s his vocation and not, thankyouJesus, mine, not where the CofE’s concerned. I don’t fucking care, it’s not human there anymore.

What does it mean to be truly human? One of God’s names is Reality. (h/t Bill Coulter, late great.)

Here in the Episcopal Church we mostly think our places are getting more human all the time; I think that about my own congregation online, and I hope you think it about yours, too – that you’re right to think so. Even the Methodists got human yesterday, though only in New York and we’ll see how long it lasts. The retired dean of Yale Divinity School officiated at his kid’s wedding awhile ago, so two bigotbrains put him up on charges, which were set to kick off Monday till the conference bishop called the whole thing off. Good for him; good for the dean and his wife and his kid and his son-in-law. The dean is quoted in today’s paper thanking God for such a great son-in-law. That was nice; truly human.

But it takes a lot more than being for Gay rights to make us human; have you seen any Gay porn blogs lately? They’re all for Gay rights, at least I presume, but good grief, they’re inhuman.

We need to quit it with all the “cumdump whore” and “slave faggot” bullshit, you know? We’re willingly throwing ourselves into an identification that’s demeaning and dehumanizing, and that’s so dumb. Like, damn, love yourself; if you wanna scarf down three dicks and swim in a veritable pool of cum, then more power to ya man, you’ve got my respect.

Amen brother

—

Interesting that the reblogger said Amen.

MEANWHILE, back here at the farm, I try to make sense of my life and keep up with how much I’ve changed these last ten years. It’s really astonishing to me; I can’t make sense of it. I’m 62, my body is starting to wear out and my soul is cleaner than ever. (Should I have written “purer”? That’s what it feels like, even though nothing can be crazier than to proclaim to myself or anyone else “I feel like I’m being purified.”)

That is what I feel, though, and it’s damn weird.

So what was it Paul said again? The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within?

I sense, more than know, what that means. Has something to do with a spark of life inside. Some bit of honesty is surely part of it; and increasing [crotchety] impatience with everything that isn’t real.

You know when people get old, they get crotchety; men especially. I’m only 62, which I’m sure to some of you is death warmed over. And only 62, to others.

I want to ask all the old people, “Did something like this happen to you? Is this normal? Is this like the reward we get for living this long?”

I do not know; I’m living this by myself, and no one can ever be sure of what’s going on with them. Our human capacity for self-deception is too great. Every discovery has to be tested; we’re too involved with ourselves to observe objectively.

Mind you I don’t claim one bit of better-than-you; I am after all still looking at porn sites. And on some level I don’t mind that at all – or I wouldn’t if could find any humane ones. The internet was made for porn, so there’s more of it than ever, but very very few where people treat each other decently.

I worry about what young Gay men are looking at these days. The internalized homophobia is just thick – except it isn’t all internalized, it’s disseminated, it’s broadcast, it’s enforced.

Here we thought, those of us who are now veteran activists, that we were rooting out societal homophobia and the psychic kind with it, but it seems like kids are killing themselves as much as ever.

I’d show you graphic examples or provide links, but you don’t want to see it. I don’t want to post them.

Now I’ll start to wind this up. When I bought this house ten years ago my sexuality was on a certain trajectory. What turned me on at 20 still turned me on at 50, while my interests got much narrower and more focused – like “I want what I want exactly this way.” I felt some concern about that, like the world stopped containing 3 billion men and now had only 300,000, but I felt I was refining my desires too. Then a couple of years ago, I finally finished the 1000th draft of my third/ultimate novel, and quickly, my sexuality changed.

This wasn’t just my aging body, but the satisfaction/destruction of a gestalt. “The Gospel According to Gay Guys” is (or so I hope) the world’s ultimate love story with the world’s hottest sex.

And then I was done, and I’m not into that stuff anymore. Or I am, but not in the same way. I said it already, I got it out of my system, so it’s out with the leather and in with the sweat pants and pajama bottoms. (I suppose I should sell that stuff on Ebay.)

I have said the Daily Office twice a day now for almost ten years, and posted it online. I was in love with God at 20 and I’m certainly in love with God even more now.

I think the repetition, as well as aging, is what does it.

I’ve told people on my sites, “Daily Office, twice a day for 30 days, and you’re bound to get closer to God.” Pray twice a day in an organized, disciplined way, and you won’t be able to stay away from God – even if getting closer is the very thing that scares you. (We want to get close, but typically not too close. Getting noticeably close causes most people to panic and back away; sure did me for awhile.)

I think probably nuns and monks, and Wesley with his Method, got this right a long time ago, even though I’m not sure they fully grasped it or anyone can.

Never my idea of a Gay role model…

But here is what I’ve learned: the soul’s desire is union with God; reunion, from before all time, and communion, here and always.

The soul’s desire is that all of life is worship, no matter what we’re doing at the time.

We can’t just will this attitude in ourselves as if it’s a decision we can make. Try that and you’ll forget it completely in 15 minutes.

Instead it works like this. “7 a.m., time to get up for the webcast. 12 noon, time to post the next services. 12 midnight, time to post again.” And the same tomorrow and tomorrow, day after day, month and year until it’s a habit that becomes a way of life.

I can tell you for sure that if I am getting closer to God these days, and I am getting refined and purified, it isn’t any doing of mine. None, zero, at most I just cooperate. At most I’ve just let go of my fear. God is no one to be afraid of; you won’t lose your personality (what makes you human), you’ll gain it more than ever before.

So you won’t be able to stand some things you used to be into. You’ll click off “House of Cards” because it simply got too dark. (The British original was both more humorous and more disturbing; I don’t like disturbing anymore. I don’t want those people in my house.)

Maybe you’ll end up selling all your sexgear, I dunno. (I do know it is better to have started getting it when you were 20-30-40 than to have waited until you were 50-60 to finally let yourself be who you are.) Whatever happens as you age, you really can welcome it, assuming you got on the right path in the beginning.

What’s the right path? The one that commits to being human, to expecting that out of yourself. The one that doesn’t mind wandering away without feeling guilty. The one that’s authentic for you, so you can be authentic with others. This “right path” doesn’t prevent you from hurting, making mistakes, loving and losing; going through dreadful things sometimes. Jesus could have done without some of those wilderness times – but he wouldn’t have been himself if he hadn’t had them.

My life still isn’t all put together, and I doubt it ever will be. Still, I’m almost shockingly happy.

That “human spirit within” is the only way to go. And I pity the fool who doesn’t go there.++

Actually, I wish we could go to Grandma’s, because she had common sense, unlike anyone in the House GOP caucus.

My grandparents, born 1892 and 1897, taught me a lot about coping with life’s problems. Principle #1: you’ve got to eat. Crises can happen, and when they disrupt your routines, go back to your routine. Get some food down, you’ll think better.

Principle #2: choose the obvious solution, even if you don’t like it. Not liking it is how you know it’s the right thing to do.

Which brings me to John Boehner. Apparently he didn’t have a grandmother, because he consistently chooses everything but the right thing to do.

So he flails – in public – while we all wonder if he’s going to take down the entire world economy. Which is to say, the standard of living of everyone on earth.

But thanks to my dad, I’ve seen this act before. It gets old; this is a rerun. The cheap little drama wasn’t entertaining the first time.

So House Republicans are out of control. And Boehner’s the worst of them.

My father got out of control a lot; my grandparents were very experienced at handling a crisis. The first thing was to get him under control. Feed him, then talk some sense into him. Make him do the right, obvious thing.

Because everything he was doing was avoiding the right, obvious thing.

Boehner should, as we all know, reopen the government and raise the debt limit. Put an end to this public spectacle.

(Sidebar: the public spectacle doesn’t bother people who are out of control. What would be mortifying to you or me just seems par for the course to them.)

If it means he no longer gets to be Speaker of the House, well, that’s too bad. Unfortunate. Not necessarily his fault entirely. But then again, he’s the one flailing in public.

He’d feel better to just go ahead and do what needs to be done. Afterwards we can talk if he feels like it.

This was my grandparents’ basic solution. I don’t know how they “made” my dad do the right thing most of the time, but they did.

Every time he got in trouble, he ran home. Usually he wanted his parents to bail him out. They did that at first, but over the years they got a little smarter about making him be responsible for himself. He still robbed them blind, though.

I guess John Boehner doesn’t have a home to go to; no Grandma. I’d feel sorry for him, except he’s pathetic.

One excuse after another; “the Tea Party made me do it.” No, they didn’t, John; nobody can make you do anything. Now straighten up and fly right.

He could have been a hero to the American people. Instead he’s sacrificing the whole country so he can keep his title – for another day or week or month.

It’s obvious the Crazy Caucus will cut him loose the minute he no longer suits their purposes.

Yoo-hoo! Yoho, you’re a bozo.

They’re out to bring down the U.S. government.

It’s no longer about Barack Obama anymore, much less Obamacare. They’ve given up on that entirely. They want to destroy the government, while insisting “this is the greatest country on earth.”

Not without a government, it isn’t.

This is a civil war without shots being fired yet.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, although I wouldn’t put it past them. We’ve seen the Tea Party’s violent tendencies before.

Tea Party rally, August 14, 2010. (therightperspective.com)

We saw it in all the furious arguing over “gun rights” last winter. Polls said 90% of Americans support background checks so criminals and crazy people can’t buy guns, but Boehner and the Republicans blocked it – while insisting they were “doing the will of the American people.”

We’ve seen the war on women, including a skirmish yesterday on including a “conscience clause” in the Continuing Resolution to reopen the government, so fundamentalist employers don’t have to pay for birth control under Obamacare.

Birth control! Really?

Birth control is health care. A lot of women take it to regularize their menstrual cycles. Preventing pregnancy is only one reason doctors prescribe the Pill. Every woman’s body is different, and they don’t need politicians telling them what they can and can’t do to take care of themselves.

Abortion is also health care. My other grandmother died the same day she gave birth to my mother. Didn’t Boehner watch “Downton Abbey” last season, when Lady Sybil died? Complications of pregnancy kill women worldwide – and the United States has a shamefully high maternal death rate.

We’ve seen the absolute willingness of fundamentalists to go to war over Gay and Lesbian rights.

Now that they’ve lost in this country, they’re exporting their war on Gays to Africa and Russia.

(The New Civil Rights Movement)

Strict Tea Party Libertarians don’t care so much about private sexual issues, but many of the Tea Party politicians are also fundamentalists. Issues get mixed in the spaghetti salads of their minds.

Then there’s the argument about “socialism.” They think Joseph Stalin has come back to life and is occupying the White House.

Ron Paul, of the racist newsletters, gave the keynote speech at the 50th anniversary convention of the John Birch Society. His son Rand Paul had to let go a racist staffer earlier this year.

This is a bloodless civil war. Many issues come together – racism, homophobia, economic decline, failure in Bush’s Wars, immigration, put-upon men crying that women have taken over the world – and now we have a faction trying to take down the U.S. government.

Boehner is James Buchanan, who was President just before Lincoln; a Southern sympathizer and appeaser trying to run out the clock on his term before the great war came.

Lincoln got elected and it came.

America’s worst president, Buchanan was a “bachelor” who lived for 14 years with Vice-President Rufus King. Andrew Jackson called them “Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy.” (Matthew Brady/Library of Congress via Wikipedia)

These are very bad times. I wish Boehner’s Grandma would slap him upside the head, but no such luck.

I know what my Grandma would do with him. She was an Eisenhower Republican. She lived through the Depression. She believed in paying her bills. She bought U.S. Bonds. She saw my Granddad ship off to World War I and my father fight in World War II. She knew the difference between patriotism and selfishness.

John Boehner and these Republicans are no patriots. He’s willing to screw the whole country so he can keep riding around in his limo.

For what? Another day, another week, another month?

This won’t last. The question is what comes next. It’s going to take all the President’s skill to avoid a bloodletting. Does he have it in him? No one knows.

He’s been strong in this current crisis, and his party is united behind him. But he wasn’t strong the last time, which helped get us into this mess.

He needs to understand this is a fight for the U.S. government. It isn’t about him, even though he’s Black and all that. It’s about government itself, with anarchists the enemy. My advice: don’t heat this cold war into a hot one, but understand we’re in the fight of our lives.

LGBTs in Russia are really suffering under Vladimir Putin’s new “anti-propaganda” law, and American Gay people are properly concerned, especially when we see what a political, financial and propaganda windfall he’s about to reap next year with the Olympics.

This has prompted a movement in San Francisco and New York, led by the writer Dan Savage and others, to boycott Russian vodka, especially the Stolichnaya brand, which for decades has touted itself as the quintessential brand of Russia’s quintessential drink (and advertised heavily in LGBT media).

Gay bars dumping so-called Russian vodka. (Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters)

But as we’ve since learned, Stoli isn’t made in Russia; it’s now made in Latvia, and the holding company which owns it issued a statement in July proclaiming itself a “fervent supporter and friend” of LGBTs – as well it should be, considering how much money we make them. So this Latvian base has prompted critics, Gay and otherwise, to denounce the vodka boycott – without coming up with any better ideas.

Some people have floated the idea of boycotting the Olympics themselves – which is closer to the mark, in my opinion, except (as Jimmy Carter discovered), it doesn’t work. The athletes who trained for the 1980 Games weren’t allowed to go, so they sat around and sulked, telling everyone how deprived they were, and four years later the medalists at the Los Angeles Olympics had their records tainted in the popular mind because “the Soviets weren’t there.”

So along sped Greg Louganis, the poster boy for Gay Olympic athletes, this summer to criticize the “boycott Sochi” movement because of those poor deprived athletes – most of whom, at least in the glamour sports, make a lot more money than Gay bartenders do, and even Gay bar owners. MSNBC had Louganis all over its air as soon as the boycott idea surfaced – which got me to thinking.

I like Greg Louganis and admire him. But he’s no one’s idea of a trenchant political analyst or even a Gay spokesman. If his opinions were worth listening to, he might have said, “Don’t keep the athletes from going, because they’re good at winning public sympathy and causing a backlash.” Or he could have gone even further and said, “What ought to happen is that LGBT sports fans and our allies shouldn’t go to Sochi and shouldn’t buy tickets.”

So since nobody seems to have thought all this through correctly, here’s the smart idea. Don’t boycott Stoli; don’t boycott the Olympics.

Don’t boycott the advertisers; they’re too big a group, while boycotts must be focused to be effective.They make too many products, and even if you want to punish them, you’re likely to buy their products even as you tell yourself you’re boycotting them. Know why “Boycott Koch Industries” doesn’t work? Because they have a near-monopoly on paper products. Are you giving up toilet paper these days? When you buy more of your favorite brand, do you really turn the package around to find out who the manufacturer is? (You should; don’t buy Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries.)

Procter and Gamble will probably advertise; even if you follow the company fairly closely, it’s hard to keep up with everything they make. P&G buys and sells brands every week. They don’t make what they used to make, and a brand that used to be owned by someone else is now owned by P&G.

Look who’s on top in this logo. Boycott the biggest company behind the Olympics, NBC. They’re the easiest to hurt and you don’t have to lift a finger.

NBC’s the one paying the massively corrupt International Olympic Committee, which talks out of both sides of its mouth like graduates of the Putin School of Doubletalk, all those billions for the broadcast rights.

Don’t watch the opening and closing ceremonies; don’t watch the competitions. Simple. (You can see all the highlights the next day on YouTube anyway.)

If you really want to get NBC’s goat, liberal Gay person, don’t watch MSNBC either during the Olympics. Make Rachel Maddow squirm. Be a real Inner and stick it in Chris Hayes’s face. Instead of watching – you won’t miss any news anyway; there won’t be any during the Olympics – fire off a tweet every night, “Boycott #Olympics Rachel Maddow @TRMS @MSNBC #corporatemasters #Putinsucks.”

This Gay woman is owned by Vladimir Putin’s sex partners at NBC-Universal.

Make her ratings drop and I guarantee you’ll get her attention. And she’ll tell her boss, who’ll tell his boss – which might eventually help shape NBC’s news coverage of Russia, Putin, the Games, the IOC – and the latest bill introduced in the Duma, authorizing the Russian police to confiscate the children of Gay people.

Remember, we got Anita Bryant fired back in the ’70s, because Florida orange juice was a specific target, easy to remember.

Refuse to watch the Olympics. And every day they’re on, skip MSNBC and tweet its hosts.

Then when it’s over, declare victory and return to your normal programming.

That’s how to do Gay politics and win. LGBTs in Russia are depending on us. We must win this, and I’ve just told you how.++

William Grant Black, 7th Bishop of Southern Ohio, died July 7 of complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 93.

You can read a fine obituary about him here. It was apparently written or commissioned by the family and first ran in the Athens, Ohio newspaper before being reprinted online by the Episcopal News Service.

He served as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens for 11 years in the ’60s and ’70s, prior to his election as bishop.

Athens is a college town, the home of Ohio University, and the parish is right across the street from the campus. I guess the Black children remember Athens fondly, and consider his ministry there a highlight of his career.

But the obituary they published left out half the story; so I’m going to fill you in.

I left this comment (slightly edited) on the ENS site.

—

This wonderfully detailed biography of the great Bishop and pastor Bill Black somehow fails to mention the thing he was most famous for in Cincinnati: he opened Church of Our Saviour, Mt. Auburn, to Gay people, decades before the rest of the Episcopal Church got its act together.

Starting in the 1970s, Our Saviour hosted a fledgling MCC congregation, which met there every Sunday night despite the opposition of some in the parish and the reluctant acceptance of others. Some people were members of both churches, and both grew as a result. For years, every time the local LGBT community had a crisis (and they often did, thanks to homophobic politicians and police), someone would call a community meeting at Our Saviour and the place would be packed.

Unless you’ve experienced discrimination, you can’t know how important it is to a stigmatized group just to have a place to go. Every other church in town was closed to us – but not Fr. Black’s church; he welcomed us. How many lives did his hospitality save? How many souls were brought to Christ because of him?

That’s what made his election as Bishop so amazing; “My God, they’ve elected the friend of the queers.” No one expected him to win – but he did. And he used his office to further the inclusion of women and LGBTs in the city, the diocese and the national Church.

I should know; I was one of the Gay leaders he embraced. When the city and the Church went through excruciating Gay turmoils – including the Disease of the Century and a billionaire’s successful campaign to write homophobic discrimination into the city charter – he put us front and center. And where were those later meetings held? In Bill Black’s old church – which to this day remains, under the leadership of Mother Paula Jackson, the capital of Gay Cincinnati.

We revered him. You know that word “reverend” that clergy routinely get appended to their names? It means “revered one.” I have to tell you, I’ve met a lot of reverends in my time, but not so many revered ones.

Bill Black was one – and on his death the heavenly choirs burst into song.

“Forasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my family…” – and that’s what we were, the very least, not even human to some people – “you did it to me.” Hallelujah!

—

I moved to Cincinnati in 1976, having been fired from my church job in Charlotte, North Carolina for being Gay. I wanted to be back in the Midwest, closer to my mother, and a convent in the Cincinnati suburbs hired me for a year. The next spring I founded a chapter of Integrity, the LGBT caucus in the Episcopal Church; a core group of our chapter members belonged to Bill Black’s church, Our Saviour in Mt. Auburn.

The MCC congregation in town had already started meeting there, and they soon hired their own pastor, a dynamic young man named Howard Gaass, who had an M.Div. from New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey. His was a remarkable hire, because in those days many MCC pastors did not have much theological education, and his call meant that MCC Cincinnati, though small, was moving up in the world.

Within a short time, Howard and I became the first Gay people in town to use our full, real names in the newspaper. The Cincinnati Enquirer was doing a pull-out section on “Gays in Cincinnati,” which they published on Palm Sunday. Naturally the reporting team contacted all the semi-out people they could find, like “the Gay minister” and “the Gay Episcopalian,” as if there were only one.

Howard and I helped lead many events, then he left town shortly afterwards. I believe he’s now an Episcopalian in the Diocese of Los Angeles, while I got appointed to the Diocesan Committee on Sexism and Sexuality by then-Bishop John Krumm, Bill Black’s predecessor.

This committee produced our report, which was viciously attacked at diocesan convention, until… I finally stood up when I couldn’t take it anymore, gave a two-minute speech and turned the tide, followed immediately by a supportive priest who was Gay but closeted, and translated my emotional speech into intellect.

I made the front page of the Enquirer the next day, by speaking out “for my people.” It was a sensation. Shortly afterward, Bill Black got elected bishop in that amazing election.

I didn’t cause it, he did. He fit the times we were in; that’s what wins elections, not five-foot-five-inch flamethrowers.

But the bottom line was clear: my church did right by me, and by all of us. That’s one of many reasons I’m an Episcopalian.

But this didn’t end homophobia and discrimination, of course, in the city or the church. Our enemies mobilized, inside and out. In a couple of years somebody invited a nationally-known lay theologian named Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, who was going to set us all straight on allowing queers in church.

I was also on the program, held at Church of Our Saviour, the Bishop’s former parish. He’s the one who put me on the program, part of the local “B” team, I guess. Paid me a hundred bucks; I wonder how much she got.

I destroyed her with a single remark. It was easy to do; she turned out to be a polysyllabic windbag, trying to win the debate with a snowjob. I still have photos of that day, and the shock on her face is priceless.

She finally left in a giant huff, Bill gathered all the clergy around and dedicated the mass to me. Greatest honor I ever got.

Concerning his obituary, I don’t know or care why his family had it written the way they did. It honors him greatly, as he deserved.

Now I have tried to do the same. Because when a man or woman touches the untouchables, like Bill Black did to us, angels rejoice. He didn’t get the acclaim Mother Teresa did, but it was the same Christian act for the same Christian reason. And while it’s obvious to all that India’s Dalits do not deserve their outcast status, LGBTs are still “controversial” in this country and around the world.

So the truth must be spoken still. Bill Black was one of the greats.++

I think she’s wrong that Methodists, Episcopalians, Disciples, Presbyterians and UCC/Congregationalists always or even mostly have a leftward tilt, and that the Christian Left doesn’t also include, say, the Baptist Jimmy Carter and most U.S. Catholic nuns. But disputing the article is not my point; the piece is fine as far as it goes. The questions it raises for people of faith are more important than what she chose to include or leave out.

Namely, where are we today as progressive Christians? What more should we be doing to assert our Christian values into the public dialogue?

The demonstration, and the photo of it I was able to obtain, are well-timed; the House of Representatives is taking up immigration reform today. Most people don’t really expect it to pass without another avalanche of draconian punishments for “illegal aliens,” but we’ll see.

What bothers me about the debate around this issue is that a Christian interpretation of it is completely lacking. The so-called “illegals” are “strangers and sojourners” in Old Testament parlance, and “neighbors” in Jesus-speak – as in “Love thy neighbor.”

They are also scapegoats, just as Christ was, for the real problems of the nation – financial collapse, unemployment, and the replacement of democracy with oligarchy.

William Holman Hunt: The Scapegoat, turned out and left to die.

Scapegoats are not allowed, Christians; you know that. There can be no question that the racism and prejudice against Latinos must stop at once.

And while there are plenty of U.S. Christians saying these very things, we get consistently drowned out by shock jocks and their imitators in Congress.

I suppose if we were equally shocking we’d get on the teevee too. But there has to be another way.

What about a political action committee that’s specifically organized by and for the Christian Left?

There are many vehicles for the Secular Left and they all do good work. But so much of the vitriolic right-wing opposition claims Christ that I think we should take him back again and set him free from his fundamentalist captors.

The basic reason fundamentalist Christianity exists is to promote racism, sexism, homophobia and war. The Southern Baptist Convention is the proof of this in its very existence; it was founded to defend slavery.

As I look around the Episcopal Church, I see several manifestations of firm belief in Christ and in God’s liberating mission to save humanity. For heaven’s sake he parted the Red Sea a long time ago, to free the Jews from slavery.

That act is still God’s template. So is the Crucifixion, which set us free from sin.

By Luiz Coelho, Jr., an ordained deacon in the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil. A Gay guy, too.

At 62 I don’t feel like I’m the person to organize the Christian Left PAC (nor that that’s necessarily the best name for it; we’re talking mainstream Christianity here). It’s something younger activists ought to do.

But they’re not, so I keep thinking about it.

What do you think? Do you not find, faithful ones, that nearly every public policy question on the American agenda is spoken of in the Bible?

Republicans in the House want to end Food Stamps, while Christ told Peter, “Feed my sheep.”

We cannot let this impasse go on, because people suffer horribly from our inaction.

I do know this: we have to take on Christian fundamentalism full in the face. That’s something we’ve never been willing to do before, which I think is probably mainstream Christianity’s biggest mistake in the last 100 years.

But from 9/11 to the shooting of Malala, the Pakistani schoolgirl who advocates for universal education, we’ve seen what fundamentalist violence is like. We’ve seen it when so-called Christians bomb abortion clinics, assassinate doctors, bomb Gay bars in Atlanta, send Orthodox priests to beat up Gay people in Russia; we see it in Israel, in Hasidic communities in New York. We’re even seeing it lately among Buddhists in Myanmar!

Slavery. Scapegoats. Patriarchy. Homophobia. Attacking the poor. Trayvon Martin. The Military-Industrial-Religious Complex, in case you’ve forgotten George W. Bush and the “Left Behind” series. None of the enemies of Christ are going away anytime soon, there’s too much money and power in sin.

We’ve lacked nerve; we’ve been unwilling to endure persecution. So we kind of nibble around the edges of theology and politics, not wanting to mix them up too much, even though half of what Jesus said was directly “political” as we understand it today.

“Feed my sheep,” don’t cut Food Stamps.

Strap your sword upon your thigh, O mighty warrior, * in your pride and in your majesty.Ride out and conquer in the cause of truth * and for the sake of justice.